By now you probably know that Jeffrey Epstein, accused pedophile who died in his jail cell, had a portrait of Bill Clinton dressed in a blue dress and heels in his Upper East Side mansion. The artist is Petrina Ryan-Kleid, a satirical portrait artist who works mostly in oils, and she completed the work, called Parsing Bill, when she was MFA student at the New York Academy of Art. The piece went up for auction at the Tribeca Ball in 2012, though it’s unclear if that’s when Epstein acquired it.
The other stuff in Epstein’s house is a little more tricky to acquire, and might be even more cursed. The town house, which federal investigators recently raided for evidence of a prostitution ring of underage girls, is on East 71st between Madison and Fifth, a block from Central Park. It’s famously one of largest homes in Manhattan—itself a renovated private school originally bought by Epstein’s mentor and Victoria’s Secret owner, Leslie Wexner. Epstein downright filled it with creepy stuff. Like the rows and rows of eyeballs framed in the entrance hall, which Vicky Ward observed in her 2003 piece for Vanity Fair. They were “imported from England.” Also in the entranceway, he had a chess board with figurines modeled in the image of his staff, per the New York Times. They were “dressed suggestively.” There was a stuffed dog in his study perched on a piano, according to Ward again. Of it, he would tell visitors, “No decorator would ever tell you to do that. But I want people to think what it means to stuff a dog.” It was a black poodle.
R. Couri Hay, an old spin doctor who has worked for or with many New York characters, and whom the Times said learned from “the great spinmeisters of the world” in a 2014 profile, told them recently, gosh, so much: He said that on the second floor there was a mural that Epstein commissioned, which depicted a prison scene with Epstein in the middle of barbed wire and guards. Hay told the Times that Epstein had invited him to the mansion off Fifth to see the mural and noted, “He said, ‘That’s me, and I had this painted because there is always the possibility that could be me again.’”
Epstein had no computers in his study, at least as of Ward’s 2003 story, but kept the computers in their own “computer room.” He had a “leather room,” a room covered in leather. He had “twice-life-size sculpture of a naked African warrior,” according to Ward. There was a life-size female doll hanging from the chandelier, as another anonymous visitor told the Times. There was a wall of ignominy that featured photographs of Mohammed bin Salman and Woody Allen. – read more
